Brent Campney, This Is Not Dixie: Racist Violence in Kansas, 1861–1927. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015. Pp. 296. $50.00 (cloth); $25.00 (paper).

Abstract

I am less sold on the author’s attempts to argue that this work stretches the chronology of the “civil rights movement” back to the period following the Civil War. It seems to me that the dominance of the “long civil rights movement” school of thinking has prompted many scholars to be a bit too loose with the term “civil rights movement.” To be sure, African Americans have always and everywhere struggled against the tide of white supremacy and racist violence, and there is a broad continuity within African American history in this regard, but as Clarence Lang, Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, and others have reminded us, if we connect those dots too securely, or too broadly, we run the risk of overlooking or flattening the equally important disjunctures in that long history of struggle, as well as the significant differences between eras of resistance and the broader historical contexts within which anti-racist activism played out. Undoubtedly, Campney has recovered an often underappreciated period of black political activism during the rise of the Jim Crow era in Kansas. In the end, though, while he is critical of “long civil rights movement” scholarship, it is simply that it is not long enough and should reach back even further to the late nineteenth century. Perhaps this critique is largely semantics, but further scholarly discussion than what Campney offers seems warranted.